The Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostova

I alternated between really liking this book and being very annoyed by it. I think if it had been one or two hundred pages shorter, I would have liked it a bit more. But with the hardcover clocking in at almost 600 pages, it didn’t have enough story to justify the length, which led to lots of filler to drag through.

“He can’t really love anyone, you know, and in the end such people are always alone, no matter how much other people once loved them.”

The basic story is this: an incredibly talented painter named Robert goes nuts one day and tries to attack a painting in a museum. He’s committed to the psychiatric care of our main character, Andrew Marlowe, who goes to extreme lengths to find out why his patient, who has suddenly stopped speaking, paints nothing but the image of a beautiful dark-haired woman. That basic story was good, and the mystery of why he attacked the painting carried me through to the (rather disappointing) ending. There’s another plot woven in involving an artist in the late 1800s and her forbidden, older lover. That was good, too. But then Marlowe, in the process of investigating Robert’s life, falls for one of his exes and that just consumed way too much of the last half of the book.

I could see that Kostova was trying to create parallels between the stories: the nineteenth century artist and her lover, Robert and his exes, Marlow and Robert’s ex — the painting, obsession, drastic age differences, forbidden love, etc. But instead of creating parallels, I found everything just got twisted up. It doesn’t help that Robert’s last name was Oliver and mystery lover’s last name was Olivier. I kept losing track of which character had which backstory. It was all too much. Then towards the end, Kostova introduces another strange pairing — a homosexual man and his much older female lover — and I started thinking, come on, really?

Still, there was a good story in there somewhere. Kostova is an excellent writer. If you wanted to sit around reading descriptions of a woman’s blonde hair and how it caught the light and how that made someone feel for hours on end, then this is the book for you. Ditto on descriptions of art and paint and brushes and canvas and so on. But don’t expect a real mystery novel — this was more frustration than thriller.